Monday, January 17, 2011

Despite months of work and early expectations of a December launch, the two sides decided on Thursday that The Daily – an anagram for “delay hit” – wouldn’t be ready by Wednesday. Apple wasn’t commenting on Friday, of course, and News Corp was saying nothing beyond confirming that the launch had been delayed, but the issue seems to be how The Daily’s app would mesh with a planned new Apple “push” subscription feature.

Apple’s motivation, supposedly, is that if there is no charge for the app, it’s usual 30 per cent cut is 30 per cent of nothing. This issue would not affect digital-only Daily, of course, but the idea of forcing consumers to pay twice would make many other publishers deeply unhappy.